Northwest Hospital Painlessly Adds Storage

There are fewer CDs being shuffled and individual server backups being performed at Northwest Hospital (Seattle) these days, thanks to a NAS (network attached storage) device and tape library system from Sony that has successfully centralized the facility's storage needs.

Northwest Hospital is a 230-bed community hospital with a staff of over 2,500. In March 2002, the hospital replaced its CD tower with two of Sony's FSV-M1 model NAS devices to consolidate its numerous CDs onto one storage server. "The old CD tower hardware took up a substantial footprint and had only 14 available CD bays," Ken Burton, Northwest Hospital's technical services manager, said. "After investigating what was available, we decided to run off of NAS instead of CD media."

NAS Is The Cure
The NAS attached to the network backbone, making enterprise-wide access from the hospital's 1,000 desktop machines straightforward. With easy storage and access to materials such as clinical reference data, the hospital can quickly output one-page summary printouts that can be handed to patients.

The hospital's critical server data is safer, too, with nightly backups of 415 GB from 24 servers onto two Sony StorStation LIB 162 tape libraries, which are based on its robust AIT-3 technology. By replacing 30 splintered individual server backups with this new centralized library solution, Northwest is assured that critical files are backed up within the necessary time window. The Sony libraries have been in operation since June and have enabled Northwest to reduce total backup time from over 60 hours to 27.5 hours (four drives running roughly seven hours/drive). The number of tapes to haul offsite has been reduced from 25 every night to only four. Sony's Advanced Intelligent Tape AIT-3 technology offers storage capacity up to 100 GB native (260 GB compressed) per cartridge, nearly double the capacity of the individual DLT tape cartridges previously used by Northwest Hospital.

The hospital's new NAS setup allows crucial data - patient files, H.R. files, and databases - to be always online and available. Additionally, the hospital employed automated tape libraries to ensure tighter administrative control of patient records and hospital files that must be carefully protected and archived.